Birth Month Flowers: What Does Yours Mean?

It’s a brand new year, with twelve beautiful months stretched out ahead of us! Whether you love to make resolutions or you’re committed to avoiding them, it’s the perfect time to both reflect back and plan ahead. As this new year blooms to life, why not consider how you can bring more of the natural world into yours?

Today we’re going to get you started with a little bit of inspiration, because if there’s one thing you can count on experiencing before you hit next New Year’s Eve, it’s another birthday! And for each month that passes, you can count on having a birth month flower.

What Is A Birth Month Flower?

To understand birth month flowers, it helps to first understand birthdays. Scholars put the first mention of a “birthday” at around 3,000 BCE, in reference to the pharaoh’s birthday as a god. In this sense, it wasn’t a birthday as we know it today, but a commemoration of an Egyptian’s crowning and his transformation.

Ancient Greeks, who offered tributes and gifts to their gods, presented moon-shaped cakes lit with candles to the moon goddess Artemis. The candles represented her glowing beauty, and they were blown out as a way to send her a prayer.

Ancient Roman worshippers celebrated their gods by creating garlands and decorating their altars with flowers. And it was during this time that civilization first celebrated the birth of a human. So while the precise history of birthdays and their flowers is a bit meandering and mysterious, it is commonly believed that the connection started here. flowers

Flowers As Special Messengers

Flowers have been imbued with special meaning for centuries. They play a role in great works of literature and poetry, from William Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson. They crop up throughout history in religion, from the lotus in Buddhism to roses in Christianity.

During Victorian times, flowers developed symbolic meanings that could convey messages of love when outright displays of affection were deemed improper.

Floriography, the art of communicating through symbolic use of flowers, sprung up as prolifically as the blooms it represented.

In modern times, we still use flowers to send messages from birthday wishes to condolences, apologies, congratulations and more. You probably don’t have to think too hard to come up with a few flowers that work well for anniversaries, and others that are appropriate at funerals. candles

The Birth Of A New Blog Series

Birth month flowers, like the signs of the zodiac, are said to reflect your personality.

For each month throughout this year, we’ll reveal its birth month flower (or flowers) and share a bit about its symbolism.

See what yours represents and whether it resonates with you. Check your friends’ and families’ personalities against their flowers and see if it explains a few things! Only you can decide whether there’s something there, or it’s a hopeless mismatch.

Whatever you do, we hope you enjoy learning more about the flowers that beautify our worlds. You might even find some new and interesting reasons to plant a few of these in your own garden!